"Between jobs" and housebound to boot

Nursing a ruptured calf muscle

I am reading an engrossing novel

While continuing to work on fractals

One of the several story threads

In this first of four volumes of Otherland

Concerns a character named Paul Jonas

Otherland is dense yet sprawling cyberfiction

Where it is hard to tell reality from virtual reality

Aside from seemingly incidental mention

Of a terraforming mission to Mars

The action takes place on Earth

And in inner rather than outer space

Of course working with fractals

Is also a form of inner space exploration

And includes the ability to zoom in indefinitely

On interesting scene details

Several hundred pages in

Paul has entered another world

Again without really knowing which

Nor much at all about how

For that matter we're not sure ourselves

Just who Paul really is

This one has two moons

Which made me think of Mars

In fact, a native soon informs Paul

That this is indeed what Earth people call Mars

There's a large city here called Tuktubim

And I noticed that this is Timbuktu scrambled

Perhaps that is what primed me to notice

What triggered this document

For the term "Soombar" is soon used

In reference to the local royalty

I quickly recognized this as a

Rearrangement of the name "Barsoom"

Barsoom was the local name for Mars

In Edgar Rice Burroughs' wonderful Mars tales

This was a mildly pleasant realization

But something was nagging at me about it

For a minute I couldn't be sure

Yet I had the feeling that this was significant

That for some reason Barsoom was in the air

Then it hit me ---

I have been using an online name generation utility

To help me come up with titles

For some of my recent fractals

A number of real or artificial languages

Can be consulted for name suggestions

The language I chose to use

And have employed in titling

A number of my Renderosity submissions

Including two just this morning

Is that of Barsoom